CERN Accelerating science

The Framework programme for research and innovation continues to be attractive for many CERN teams across the organization: 46 proposals with the participation of CERN were submitted to different Horizon Europe programmes. With 21 proposals, the ERC remains the most popular programme for the CERN research community. The ERC, together with the Research Infrastructure Programme (7 proposals) and the Marie-Curie Programme (4 proposals), compose the Excellence Science Pillar of Horizon Europe, which is the main EU source of funding for fundamental research, and hence has been the main focus of interest of the CERN community for nearly 10 years. In addition to the projects where CERN participates as a beneficiary, there were also 34 Marie-Curie post-doctoral fellowship applications, submitted by individual researchers (a record number).

Other programmes, to which several proposals have been submitted, include the European Innovation Council (EIC) and the Widening Excellence part of Horizon Europe.

As regards the success rates, 30 out of 46 proposals have been evaluated so far. Out of the 30 evaluated proposals, 9 have been funded, which gives a success rate of 30%. This is quite good, taking into account that the average success rate of Horizon Europe programmes is around 15%, and that most of the proposals were submitted to highly competitive programmes such as the ERC, Marie-Curie and EIC. And then 3 of the evaluated proposals are ranked on a reserve list, which means that they still have a chance of being funded, provided that some additional budget becomes available. The 34 individual Marie-Curie proposals are all still under evaluation.

Out of the 46 proposals, 19 have been submitted by CERN and 27 by other institutes. It is to be noted that 16 out of the 19 proposals submitted by CERN are ERC grant proposals. In other words, the number of projects where CERN took the lead of a consortium and submitted a proposal for a new EU project together with a number of other participants, has been quite low, and that has not been the case in previous years. 

Out of the 9 successfully evaluated proposals (so far), 1 is coordinated by CERN: HEARTS, a project for providing European industry with access to high-energy accelerators for radiation shielding and testing, which was funded under the Space programme of the Digital and Industry Cluster of Horizon Europe.

With 16 proposals under evaluation, there are still hopes for some other successful Horizon Europe projects among those that were submitted in 2022.

In 2023, the new cycle of Horizon Europe programmes (covering 2023-2024) will start. There will be multiple opportunities for EU support to CERN programmes and projects, including new initiatives such as the Green Village and the CIPEA programme. The EU Office welcomes for discussion and provides advice to everyone who has ideas for new projects and is looking for EU funding for this purpose.

The announcement was done during the ceremony of the prestigious Digital Preservation Awards at the iPres 2022 conference, held in Glasgow, UK. The Digital Preservation Awards  are the most prominent celebration of achievement for those people and organisations who have made significant contributions towards a sustainable future for our digital assets.

ARCHIVER was announced finalist for the Award for Collaboration and Cooperation in June 2022. The Award celebrates significant collaboration across institutional, professional, sectoral and geographical boundaries which have had a demonstrable and positive impact on digital preservation.

An Horizon 2020 project, ARCHIVER - Archiving and Preservation for Research Environments - will introduce significant improvements in the area of archiving and digital preservation services, supporting the IT requirements of European scientists and providing end-to-end archival and preservation services, cost-effective for data generated in the petabyte range with high, sustained ingest rates, in the context of scientific research projects. It project is managed by a consortium of procurer research organisations (CERN, DESY, EMBL-EBI and PIC) and experts (Addestino and Trust-IT).

"On behalf of CERN and the ARCHIVER partners, I would to thank the DPC and the Preservation community for this moment and great recognition. It has been a long journey that started back in 2019 (since then the world changed just a little bit...) And yes ARCHIVER indeed embodies the spirit of what Collaboration and Cooperation means i) Across different domains of science, ii) Across different regions in Europe and UK, iii) And of course between the public and the private sector with SME producing competitively high quality software and services designed for Big Science that will certainly commoditise the benefits of digital preservation across. There is a "before ARCHIVER" and "after ARCHIVER" for LTDP in science.

Thank you very much to the EC and all that contributed to this effort and let's now build what comes next on it!"

Joao Fernandes, ARCHIVER Coordinator

 From the Award application:

The work accomplished in ARCHIVER is a game-changer for the approach taken to long-term research data management both from a mindset and technological perspective, i.e. what data do researchers retain, how to keep intellectual control of it and what data stewards must do to ensure long-term value can be realised from it. The social importance and economic benefits of making scientific data open and reusable according to FAIR principles (Findable Accessible Interoperable Reusable) have already been demonstrated. However, there are still major gaps when it comes to the sustainability of long-term accessibility and usability of research data, for example as discussed in the FAIR Forever report from the Digital Preservation Coalition DPC).

These gaps put data at long-term risk, they prevent the construction and operation of sustainable Trusted Digital Repositories services, and they affect organizations both large and small who are tasked with being custodians of valuable research artefacts.

The ARCHIVER selected companies are promoting solutions that are environmentally sustainable, providing the means to analyse and reduce the carbon footprint as an aid towards carbon neutrality. As service providers, the consortia led by Arkivum and Libnova can support a range of organizations to take steps to respond to this urgent global challenge, aligning the innovative R&D produced with initiatives such as the Code of Conduct for Data Centres and the more recent Green Public Procurement criteria part of the Green Deal.

These are the aspects the ARCHIVER project has set out to solve by selecting these European SME companies with expertise in open data, archiving and data preservation to develop innovative solutions.

Originality of projects, autonomy of action and willingness to take risks – this is what motivated Magdalena Kowalska, a CERN staff member at ISOLDE, to apply for EU funding at CERN. Not just any projects; her focus is on the ones that allow researchers to fully deploy their ingenuity. This year, the Polish scientist who spent over 20 years at the Organization, has been awarded a new grant from the European Research Council (ERC). With this, she has become the only one among her CERN peers to have received two such grants.

Magdalena's journey can be a good starting point for potential candidates to European projects. Unlike the projects that bring together a consortia of ten, twenty or even forty members on broad themes, ERC projects are much more flexible and highlight the innovative work of a small team of researchers. "This is one of the only truly bottom-up European programmes - one that gives voice to fundamental research and cross-disciplinary approaches," explains Magdalena. Familiar with interdisciplinary work through her role as ISOLDE's physics coordinator and scientific secretary, she has been able to learn from the hundreds of annual users of the facility and in particular from the links between physics and biology.

Eager to open up to new horizons, Magdalena obtained her first ERC project back in 2015 to explore the use of unstable isotopes in nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy. Called BetaDropNMR, this “Starting Grant” project received sufficient funding to finance her salary as CERN LD staff, a post-doc, and PhD student with equipment funding from CERN and thus start building her own research team. "The main advantage of such funding is that it gives researchers a large degree of scientific freedom - this is particularly interesting for those working in large collaborations," she adds.

From one project to the next. In last April, she again got selected for an ERC grant. This time, it is PresOBEN, a fundamental research “Consolidator Grant” project looking at the detailed structure of unstable nuclei. Magdalena emphasises the intense preparatory work that led to this second success: “It is important to secure the foundations: to have a solid proof of principle via simulations or experiments, to build on recent publications and to demonstrate how the impact of past successes can be vastly increased by the funding. Above all, one must show that the project is original and risky but feasible, timely, and that you’re a unique person to carry it out”. Obtaining such funding is not a guarantee and a certain amount of imagination may be necessary to plan for contingencies, bring together partners with complementary expertise, and of course adapt the presentation for the selection panel.

ERC grants are not the only funding that have enabled Magdalena to move her projects forward. There are many seed-funding opportunities for CERN personnel such as the Knowledge Transfer Fund and the Medical Applications (MA) budget which help launch projects in their early phase. The latter enabled the GammaMRI project to have first results and, thus, get selected for funding under Horizon 2020's Future and Emerging Technologies, the programme's high-risk / high-gain funding scheme (now replaced by EIC Pathfinder). Magdalena is now also starting an MA project on an innovative Nuclear Magnetic Resonance technology (RD-ZULF-NMR).

From quantum-resistant cryptography to advanced robotics, from two-dimensional materials to extreme data mining, a dozen Horizon Europe calls have been identified by CERN’s EU Projects Office as of potential interest for the organisation. If you are considering EU funding for your R&D projects, please do not hesitate to subscribe to the “EU projects @ CERN” Newsletter, to register for the dedicated training and to contact the EU Office.

Started one year and half ago, the Horizon Europe Programme has generated a lot of interest from the CERN community. So far, the Organization has been involved in more than 60 proposals, if we exclude the individual Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowships. Success is clear. With over 30% of its projects selected of funding, CERN is doing very well compared to the average Horizon Europe rate, which stands around 15%.

As was the case in the previous EU Framework Programmes for Research and Innovation, most popular with our scientists and engineers are the European Research Council (ERC) Grants, Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) and Research Infrastructure (RI) programmes. 13 of the 19 successful projects will be funded under one of these three programmes. This success includes 4 ERC Grants hosted by CERN and the Muon Collider Design Study, coordinated by CERN, which was recently selected for funding.

While these three programmes have been traditionally very popular and successful for CERN, a somewhat worrying trend is the declining interest in the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Doctoral Networks, in particular those where CERN takes the lead. In the latest issue of the “EU Projects @ CERN” newsletter, we took a dive into this programme specifically aimed at highly skilled doctoral candidates, to train them, stimulate their creativity, enhance their innovation capacities and boost their employability in the long-term.

On the positive side is the enhanced participation of CERN in other Horizon Europe programmes. Worth mentioning are one of our flagship projects, ATTRACT, whose Phase 1B will be funded by the European Innovation Council, and the HEARTS project, coordinated by CERN, which will be funded under the Digital, Industry and Space Cluster of Horizon Europe.

From quantum-resistant cryptography to advanced robotics, from two-dimensional materials to extreme data mining, a dozen Horizon Europe calls have been identified by CERN’s EU Projects Office as being of potential interest for the organisation. If you are considering EU funding for your R&D projects, please do not hesitate to visit the CERN EU Projects website and contact the EU Office, for a discussion, advice or opinion, and support in the preparation of the proposal.

Within Horizon Europe, the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) aim to support researchers from all over the world on their doctoral education and postdoctoral training. With a budget of €6.6 billion (2021-2027) the MSCA aim to support 65,000 researchers including 25,000 PhDs in four types of funding opportunities.

Doctoral Networks (DN) aim to implement doctoral programmes by partnering with organisations from different sectorsacross Europe and beyond (universities, research institutions, research infrastructures, business including SMEs). For students, the programme helps stimulate their creativity, enhance their innovation capacities and boost their employability in the long-term.

The selection procedure for Doctoral Network is open, transparent and merit-based. The 2022 call will recruit around 10 MSCA doctoral students.

The Post Doctoral Fellowship supports researchers’ careers and foster excellence in research. This deadline to apply is 14 September.

Staff Exchanges supports collaboration and staff exchange between existing research institutions.

Cofund provides support for an existing doctoral or dost-doctoral programme.

To know more on Who and How to apply and how to manage your project, please consult the EC portal website and the Work Programme 2021-2022.

For any advice on MSCA, please contact Ingrid Haug ingrid.haug@cern.ch

It does not matter whether you are new to EU- funded projects or have decades of experience with them. Open Science has become an integral part of the funding schemes in the past years. For this, we must ensure that the knowledge from projects is not lost and can be reused in the future. What does that mean actually? Basically you are asked to look after the data, software, publications you might produce in a European project and describe measures on how you preserve them and make them open to the public.

In this short series about Open Science in EU projects, we will explore the two main crucial aspects that make a good policy: data management plans and open access to publications. This month, we will focus on the former.

Data Management Plans (or DMPs) are in principle guidelines that enable you and your collaborators to reflect on what types of data you produce in your project, how you manage it, preserve it and how you intend to share it with colleagues as well as the public. A crucial part of the DMP is to make your (project) data FAIR. FAIR - which stands for Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable - . FAIR guides your way of discussing what to do with your data such as:

• Which storage/repository do I use so that others can find the data afterwards?
• How can people access it once the project ends?
• Do the datasets we produce come in specific formats and are they interoperable with community standards or others?
• Can external people understand how the data has been gathered and produced when they reuse it? 

Sounds complicated? Use the template provided by the European Commission or by the European Research Council, and ask us and we help you answer the questions and sections in the templates. Contact us via dmp-os@cern.ch

Sounds like something is missing? Indeed, a DMP is fairly focused on data, but if your data production, analysis etc depends on software, analysis tools etc, please make sure to mention it and (and think about making it available open source as well!). If you need more input and support for the reflections and creating the DMP, please contact us.

Several Horizon Europe 2021-2022 calls have been identified by CERN’s EU Projects Office as of potential interest for the organisation. In order to give you a flavour of what’s in there for you, the Office has handpicked a selection of interesting ones for 2022 as outlined below. The Horizon Europe 2023-2024 calls will be released at the end of the year.

From quantum-resistant cryptography to advanced robotics, from two-dimensional materials to extreme data mining, the highlighted calls carry opportunities for CERN, for your research and for your career. Furthermore, they display the full diversity of what can be the purpose of an EU project: fundamental research of course, but also societal applications and market opportunities.  

If your research topic is not covered in the table below,  

• check the full list curated by the CERN’s EU Projects Office here; 
• and/or browse the European Commission portal for an overview of all the calls.  

Applying to a call is a specific art to achieve success and for this reason, the Office has set up a training to help CERN personnel understand what is an EU Project, how they work and, more especially, how to apply to one. This training also provides information about the structure, content and novelties of Horizon Europe, the new EU framework programme for research and innovation. 

In September 2021, the 32nd edition of the European Union Contest for Young Scientists (EUCYS) held in Salamanca, Spain assembled 158 promising young scientists aged 14 to 20, coming from 34 countries. EIROforum organisations awards a limited number of Special Donated Prizes to contestants who, according to the EUCYS Jury, would benefit from the specific experience that these prizes offer. CERN awards a one-week visit to the Laboratory and its experiences.

In June 2022, CERN welcomed two young German students, Leo Neff and Leonard Münchenbach, for a rich programme of visits to detectors, experiments, facilities and CERN’s S’cool LAB. Meetings with engineers, physicists, guides and computer scientists were a great opportunity for them to build network for their future careers.

Their project on “Physical description and modelling of paper strip flights” consists of using a formula to precisely calculate the phenomenon of the speed of the paper strips of a certain shape and size rotate when they fall. They constructed a frame and used slow-motion camera and computer software to investigate a wide variety of stripe shapes.

Both students, after their visit, are considering coming back to CERN to follow their scientific career.

The CERN EU office, the legal office and the external grants are getting together to give a complete training on all you wanted to know about EU funded projects.

With six modules, the training will teach you how to prepare and write an EU proposal, how to handle the project when funded, how to deal with all the legal and financial aspects and how to communicate about it.

The next session will take place online on 13-14 September 2022.

Register now.

It takes years for a spinoff idea to leave the lab, mature and eventually hit the market, if ever. ATTRACT aims to develop a funding model to help diminish the time needed and increase the chances of great ideas leaving labs and directly benefiting society. 

In its first phase, which focused on turning ideas into functional prototypes, ATTRACT supported 170 breakthrough ideas with €100 000 each in seed funding in order to create a proof-of-concept pool of ideas in detection and imaging. The pool includes drones capable of detecting pollution in the air, through to AR/VR aid for surgeons and new cryptographic methods. 

During a kick-off meeting on 31 May 2022, ATTRACT presented the 18 R&D&I projects that it had selected from the 68 proposals in the proof-of-concept pool. The 18 projects have received between €500 000 and €2 000 000 each, depending on their start-end technology readiness level (TRL), to help them to move from a prototype to a pre-market product (risk mitigation phase).

One of the R&D&I projects selected for the second phase of ATTRACT is AHEAD, a project by CERN and five other partners, which proposes to develop a new way to manufacture components for the next generation of cooling systems. By combining 3D-printing technologies, AHEAD aims to produce cooling systems with a reduced number of components that are lighter, smaller and therefore able to be placed closer to areas that need to be cooled. Better performance for the complex cooling systems at CERN is an evident potential benefit. Furthermore, such technologies could also reduce fuel consumption in the aerospace industry. CERN will also study the extension of the potential application of the product to the market of natural refrigeration plants.

In addition to 18 R&D&I projects, a further 18 Academy projects and socioeconomic studies will also benefit from €28 million in EU funding.

“Incremental innovation will not be sufficient for addressing the upcoming societal challenges in the next decades. The ATTRACT project and methodology aim to accelerate the market uptake of breakthrough innovation”, says Pablo Garcia Tello, ATTRACT project coordinator and leader of the Development of EU Projects and Initiatives section at CERN.

The Academy call will run programmes for university students to generate ideas for social innovation inspired by the technologies developed within the R&D&I projects. Each student programme has received between €80 000 and €240 000.

Under the Socioeconomic Studies call, eight projects have received funding of €125 000 to conduct novel studies designed to gain new perspectives and enrich traditional impact metrics in order to evaluate the current working methods of ATTRACT and other European research infrastructures and innovation ecosystems and assess their impact on society.

For more information and to follow the development of the projects, please visit:

www.attract-eu.com 

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*ATTRACT has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under Grant Agreement No. 101004462.

**AHEAD is a consortium in which CERN collaborates with CSEM SA, Thales Alenia Space France, LISI Aerospace, the Norwegian University of Science and Technology and InanoEnergy. 

Sources and extra material:

https://indico.cern.ch/event/887477/contributions/3741865/attachments/2002012/3342873/11_SWaP_CERN-ATTRACT-P1.pdf 

https://attract-eu.com/e28-million-fund-will-finance-36-projects-that-hold-the-most-promise-for-science-and-society/